Responses by Tony Pinkney
1.If you were shipwrecked on a desert island (as in the BBC radio programme) and could have one Virginia Woolf work and/or scholarly book on Woolf, what would it be and why?
1.If you were shipwrecked on a desert island (as in the BBC radio programme) and could have one Virginia Woolf work and/or scholarly book on Woolf, what would it be and why?
I’d want to take Jacob’s
Room - perhaps it’s characteristic of male readers of Woolf to prefer this?
– and, on the literary-critical front, a copy of David Galef’s The Supporting Cast: A Study of Flat and
Minor Characters (1993). The Galef
book has a very fine chapter on Jacob’s
Room and, remarkably, a full-scale character index for that novel too, running
to thirty-eight pages – he claims there are no less than 810 named
and unnamed figures in the book! So,
with both novel and critical study at my disposal, I’d have plenty of material
for mulling over issues of literary characterisation. I’ve always particularly admired the way
narratologists reduce complex texts to elegant geometrical diagrams, so I’d be busily
working out an underlying ‘character-system’ for Jacob’s Room’s 810 figures during the lonely years on my Robinson
Crusoe island.
2.What do you think Woolf’s writing has to offer to young
women readers today (inside or outside the academy)?
The liveliest students on my Modernism undergraduate course
this year are women who are taking creative writing courses as a significant
part of their overall English Literature degree scheme. So Lily Briscoe becomes a role model for
their own creative endeavours, and Woolf is an extraordinarily suggestive
reservoir of stylistic possibilities to them.
As creative writing begins to shoulder out traditional literary study (I
often feel that our generation of academics may probably be the very last
literary critics as such), I think that Woolf will be the modernist writer who
can best hold her own in that process.
3.What, for you, is the single most memorable or interesting
Virginia Woolf sentence (other than the December 1910 statement), and why?
I’ve always been much taken by this fragment of a sentence
from early in To the Lighthouse, as
Mrs Ramsay and Charles Tansley walk to town together: ‘a man digging in a drain
stopped digging, and looked at her; let his arm fall down and look at
her’. There’s always a man digging in modernism
(compare the ‘man with the hat’ who ‘regretfully plung[es] his spade in the
earth’ in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist);
and I suspect that middle-class experience in Woolf, more specifically, always
has to be validated by some working-class gaze or activity. My family were ‘diggers’, though underground as
miners rather than on the surface, which I suppose is why I am attuned to this
motif. There are in fact more mentions
of miners and mining in Woolf’s fiction than you might expect.
4.How do you see your own work on or around Woolf developing
over the next five years?
Well, I don’t usually work on Woolf specifically, but I
would at some point like to test out my hunch or hypothesis that William Morris
and his communist politics are an important background presence across her
fiction. We know that Clarissa Parry and
Sally Seton had read Morris at Bourton (and founded a society to abolish
private property in the light of that reading); and more generally 1920s London
is certainly haunted by the 1880s across that book. Moreover, I sense that every Thames-side scene
or memory in Woolf’s fiction (Dalloway,
Lighthouse, Waves) is secretly inhabited by the utopian upriver Thames trip
undertaken in Morris’s News from Nowhere. So could one conjure a communist or utopian
Woolf out of this? It would be worth a
try.
